Here we go again. Just in time for the local elections, Kemi Badenoch gets all tough and talks about “zero tolerance” including for public drug -taking, shoplifting, fare dodging and vandalism.
Well, she is right, but rhetoric is not enough. We must know how she intends to do it, and the only suggestion she makes is to fund another 10,000 police officers to implement a strategy along the lines of Giuliani’s in 1990s New York.
Ten thousand, Kemi? For the entire country? Guliani put 11,000 new officers on the streets, and that was just for one city. Talk is cheap. Action is not. Soundbites do not make policy.
Divide 10,000 by the number of cities in the UK, and each would get another 131 officers, and that applies to cities alone, not to all the towns and villages as well.
In 2000, as the then Shadow Home Secretary, I pointed out the resources that Giuliani had deployed and then said honestly that we could not promise the same thing in every city, town and village, but that what we could do was to tackle the scourge of drugs, which then accounted for more than 33 per cent of all crime and over 80 per cent of acquisitive crime.
An approach of zero tolerance to drugs, all the way from importing to selling to possessing, would therefore have a major impact on the overall crime rate.
Of course, it was not just a matter of extra police but of re-directing police time so that officers spent more time on the beat and less dealing with bureaucratic procedures and more in the community and less in the station.
I remember wanting to copy the New York initiative of cops in shops.
Kemi Badenoch's crime crackdown is dangerously naive. I've crunched the numbers | Getty Images
Yet Kemi misses the real point, which is that law enforcement is not just a matter for police. If you work for Waitrose and have the guts to tackle a shoplifter, you can lose your job, as a recent case showed.
Does she propose to make that unlawful? If you stand up to vandals, the police are as likely to arrest you as the vandals, because it is easier and ticks more boxes.
Citizens pass by on the other side, not out of cowardice but because they fear they could be the ones in trouble if they intervene.
What does Kemi say to them? Parents can find social services getting involved if they punish their children. Teachers can find their jobs in danger if they go against political correctness.
In the buildings of almost any public service, large notices proclaim that abuse towards staff will not be tolerated, but the public is expected to tolerate all manner of shoddy service, from being left in hospital corridors on trolleys all the way down to the absence of trolleys at stations. Yet none of Kemi’s easy, platitudinous pronouncements is well thought through.
The bigger picture is simply missing. But then, there are elections coming when soundbites arrive thick and fast and incisive probing is sketchy.
Just remind me again, Kemi, what did the Conservatives do about all the scourges you list when they had the luxury of 14 years in power?